What happened to taxes?

[Eddie Verdde]

Benjamin Franklin said that nothing in this world could be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

However, for some reason the concept of taxes was abandoned in the last iterations of the game.

I am not necessarily in favor of returning to a system like in Civ I, where you essentially had to balance your investment in science, luxury or gold, but I would like to see some sort of taxing system that could represent more directly what happens in real life. Higher taxes would increase the revenue of your empire but make your citizens unhappy and increase corruption, while lower taxes would make your people happy, increase trade and immigration but leave your treasury empty. That would create interesting dynamics in the gameplay.

I added a poll to this thread to get a sense of what people feel about this issue.

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

I don't have experience with Civ 1 so someone else would have to explain how taxes worked.

I did like the concept of sliders in Civ 4. Where "commerce" was extracted from tiles, which then paid for science research and border growth.

 

[Krajzen]

Taxes were a profound mechanic deeply rooted in history and offering serious dilemmas, therefore they should come back

 

[Naokaukodem]

The problem with taxes, at least as I played them, was that you always wanted to favozize science as much as possible, at the expanse of gold and culture. This leaded to situations where you had no treasury and when you needed to upgrade your units, you put the sliders 100% gold for some turns and you could upgrade, then back to full science (or nearly, though there were some cases where 100% [science] wouldn't put you in banckrupcy). I didn't play Deity in Civ4 IIRC, my max setting was maybe King or Emperor, but I guess that this philosophy would be even more true in Deity or Sid, you know, to catch up with the AI. As to culture, it could have been interesting for border wars, but usually those were dealt through classical warfare as soon as possible.

So I was seeing it better to scrap it, to add Gold as another resource to take care separately, which was supposed to add deapth.

Now though, with separate Civics, and the possible implementation of all Uniques in their tree (a la Brazil), not to mention the fact that you could manage the slider city by city (you don't need your whole empire to build up culture for a one-city culture war, especially when anyway you want to conquer your neighbors, especially on high difficulty levels) maybe with a governor inside, and the new tourism mechanic, we might want to emphazise culture more. As to gold, I prefer it to stay like that, separate, unless you give Firaxis a good reason to switch back.

 

[dagriggstar]

Honestly the main thing stopping me from going back to 4/freeciv are sliders. I just straight up don't like them.

I think there is a colonial taxes social policy you can take. Anything more complex than taking a policy or developing a civic to be honest I'm not a fan of.